From njasloane at gmail.com Thu Jul 7 17:18:20 2016
From: njasloane at gmail.com (Neil Sloane)
Date: Thu, 7 Jul 2016 11:18:20 -0400
Subject: [OEIS-news] OEIS targeted by a spammer
Message-ID:
In the past couple of days the OEIS has been attacked by what appears to be
a single person, using several different names.
(I) People using 3 different login names (Frank Miller,
Neeraj Rawat, Amarnath Purty) created a lot of spam pages on the wiki
in the past 48 hours. The pages were all ads for Quickbooks
(it you go to "Recent Changes" on the wiki you can see the list).
All three names have been blocked both on the wiki and
on the database side.
Also someone using the name Rupesh Kumar sent an email
saying that he was the same person as Frank Miller and he had lost his
password. So that is another suspicious name.
(II) There have been 60 or 70 requests for logins to the OEIS in the past 2
days. I think all except 2 were bogus (and have been silently rejected as
spammers) If you are a bureaucrat you can see the list on the wiki under
"rejected requests". I don't know if editors can see it. It is quite
tricky to tell which ones are fakes.
Look at this request, which arrived today:
Name: Kanchan Kumari
Email: kk492412 at gmail.com (confirmed).
IP address: 116.203.183.231 (This is from the ISP MTS in Kolkata)
Biography: Here is one of my projects: IMSLP Orchestra to do world
premiere recording of Symphony by Franz Asplmayr. I graduated from Wayne
State University with a bachelor's degree in Film Studies in 2008. In 2004,
I wrote for WSU's student newspaper, The South End, an article on the
celebration for the 100,000th sequence to be added to the OEIS, A100000.
That is worrying because it is specifically targeted at the OEIS. In fact
it is copied from Alonso Del Arte's OEIS user page.
As I said, there have been about 70 of these fake requests in the past 2
days.
Is there any way we can find out who is doing this?
If you see any more pages being created on the wiki,
and especially if you see anyone doing strange edits to sequences,
please let one of us (Charles Greathouse, David Applegate, me) know right
away.
My phone number is 732 828 6098
Best regards
Neil
Neil J. A. Sloane, President, OEIS Foundation.
11 South Adelaide Avenue, Highland Park, NJ 08904, USA.
Also Visiting Scientist, Math. Dept., Rutgers University, Piscataway, NJ.
Phone: 732 828 6098; home page: http://NeilSloane.com
Email: njasloane at gmail.com
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